Lenda de Yun Qian (2020)

A cheesy well produced GL historical drama, an hour well spent!

I am always searching for good GL shows to watch because as much as like BL shows, as a lesbian I want more content that caters to me. A lot of the dramas with lesbian/sapphic characters and relationships is awfully serious and/or tragic which is fine, but sometimes I just want something that is cheesy and ridiculous. Let me tell you that this was exactly that! And it feels really, really nice to find that content.
With a runtime of about 1h, this drama won't take too long to watch, but manages to create a story that got me emotional in the last few episodes because I had started to care about the characters.

The first few episodes of the show are quite humorous and full of clichés of the genre with a character (Xiaoqian), very excitable and decidedly cute, travelling to the past and meeting Muyun, the stern and serious character, and then said character travelling to the modern world and discovering said modern world with every moment that you would expect (special mention for her meeting Xiaoqian's cat). The story then starts to become stronger and denser with the introduction of the character of Hongyan. I don't want to reveal too much, but this arc which culminates in the last few episodes is what made the drama go from a cheesy romcom to a feeling of "dang, this is actually quite good".
They manage to pack enough backstory and background world information in an hour to make a somewhat coherent story and world that works within the limited time.

The actresses do a good job at portraying their characters and the archetype they each represent whether the peppy happy Xiaoqian, the serious Muyun whose shell was broken by Xiaoqian, or the broken Hongyan. They managed to sell me those characters which I wasn't convinced would happen when I first started watching the show. Wang Laoji (Muyun) and Peng Jingxian (Hongyan) in particular do a good job. Wang Xiaoyu manages to sell the character of Xiaoqian well enough, which can be hard (it's like being able to sell the character of the Prince in Cinderella without making it too cheesy or a caricature).

There is clearly 0 budget, but with that limited budget, they got some nice costumes, some nice music, and created a coherent whole in terms of photography and cinematography. It is very in line with this type of historical Chinese drama from what I am picking up from my watching (the slow motion in fights, the close-ups, the looks, etc.) and it works well. The editing isn't done really well, but the story flows well enough that it is not too much of a bother. If you don't have too high of expectations for it, you'll be fine.

I don't know that I would necessarily rewatch it on my own, but if a friend wanted to watch it and asked me to watch it with them, I would for sure rewatch it without an issue.

In conclusion, it delivers on what it promises and gives me exactly what I wanted. A cheesy and slightly ridiculous, but well produced within a limited budget show with a nice story and pretty girls who fall in love. What more could I ask? (A lot more, but for tonight, this is just right.)

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